Israel’s president gave the mandate to form a government to the opposition leader, Gadi Eisenkot, rather than to the incumbent prime minister, whose bloc finished eight seats short of a majority. Isaac Herzog’s office announced the decision on Saturday evening and scheduled the tasking ceremony for Sunday. The arithmetic explains it: Benjamin Netanyahu’s camp took 53 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and the opposition bloc 48, neither near the 61 a majority requires, and in the president’s consultations 67 members backed Eisenkot against 46 for Netanyahu. Likud, at 27 seats, remains the largest single party and its leader will not form the government. In Mississippi the count that decides the last Senate seat did not move at all: the tally stood at 2,574 votes on 953,314 counted, stamped 5:02 p.m. on Friday, with mailed and affidavit ballots due or curable by 5 p.m. on Tuesday.

The administration and the rule of law

The Federal Register published nothing on November 7 or November 8. Zero documents came back for the two-day window, which makes the weekend’s rulemaking record empty, and the last substantive business was Friday’s 80 documents, most of which this report described yesterday. A register silent on a weekend is the publication schedule working as designed, not a gap in what could be read.

The courts

The Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit filed no opinions in the window, and the district court in Washington recorded no new complaints. Of the five watched dockets, two moved. MSW Media v. Department of Justice recorded ECF 24 and ECF 25 on November 7, the opposition and cross-motion described in yesterday’s edition. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, the East Potomac golf case, recorded two minute entries on November 7 whose text the feed does not carry; a minute entry records that something happened in court, not what. Beatty v. Trump and both Phang v. Blanche dockets, the district case and its appeal, were silent.

Markets

Nothing traded. The board is Friday’s close, the same figures yesterday’s edition carried: the S&P 500 at 7,376.86, up 23.13 points or 0.31 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 24,579.425, up 264.427 or 1.09 percent; the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 51,285.73, down 237.33 or 0.46 percent; the VIX at 25.64, down 2.54 or 9.01 percent.

The ten-year Treasury yielded 4.859 percent at 17:05 ET, and Treasury’s curve for November 6 ran 4.51 percent at two years, 4.86 at ten and 5.26 at thirty, a 2s10s spread of +0.35 against +0.38 the day before. The dollar index was 102.279, up 0.732 or 0.72 percent. Gold’s last print was $4,079.50, down $34.00, and front-month WTI crude $90.34, down 18 cents, both stamped November 7 and both carried forward rather than traded.

Total public debt outstanding was $40,556,120,784,984 on November 5, up $5,890,737,374 from the day before. Of that, $32,766,722,473,716 was held by the public and $7,789,398,311,268 was intragovernmental.

The economy

Nothing new entered the labor and price series. Unemployment was 4.1 percent in October, a tenth below September. Total nonfarm payrolls were 159,293 thousand, 165 thousand above September’s 159,128 thousand. The all-items consumer price index for September was 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, 1.96 points or 0.59 percent above August, and no October reading has been published. The next consumer price report is the one that will say whether hiring and prices are still moving apart.

Elections and the midterms

The congressional ledgers did not move over the weekend. AP’s ledger, as displayed by the tracker at Votelect, read 252 Democrats to 161 Republicans with 22 House races uncalled, and the Senate 54 to 44 with two uncalled. The page’s own clock read 3:59 a.m. PT on November 8, and its House ledger still carried the derivation stamp of 5:46 p.m. PT on November 6. No further House call has been recorded since Friday evening.

Mississippi is where a reader needs the timestamp. The tally 16 WAPT displays, stamped 5:02 p.m. on November 6, had Scott Colom at 467,930 and Cindy Hyde-Smith at 465,356, a margin of 2,574 votes on 953,314 counted, 97 percent of the estimated total. ABC’s results page, updated at 3:16 a.m. ET on November 8, shows the same two totals, so no votes have been posted since Friday evening.

Yesterday’s edition carried a reading of the same evening: 953,222 counted and a margin of 2,498 at 5:30 p.m. ET, twenty-eight minutes later the same day with 92 fewer votes counted. The two are snapshots of one evening rather than a count that moved, and the difference is which batch a tracker had loaded. What has moved is the estimate of what remains. The state Republican chairman, Mike Hurst, told CNN that between 23,000 and 25,000 affidavit or mail-in ballots were outstanding, as WLBT reported, a wider figure than the 10,000 to 15,000 provisional ballots this report carried yesterday.

The calendar has not moved. Mailed ballots must be received, and affidavit voters must cure a missing identification, by 5 p.m. on November 10. Counties must certify by November 13. Mississippi law provides no recount for this race, and a plurality wins. The race is uncalled.

Alaska is unchanged. AP had Mary Peltola at 48.2 percent and Senator Dan Sullivan at 47.9, the same percentages as this report read on Saturday, and ranked-choice tabulation begins November 18.

The markets have priced both. Polymarket put Colom at 99.0 percent on $72,518 of twenty-four-hour volume and Hyde-Smith at 0.9 percent on $78,561, Peltola at 98.6 percent on $160,104 and Sullivan at 1.4 percent on $103,060. Those are the venue’s prices, not this report’s view. The Mississippi book prices a near-certainty beside a count frozen at 2,574 votes with more than twenty thousand ballots outstanding, and the two are not in conflict: a market is a forecast, and this one is a count.

The world

The mandate went to the man with fewer seats. Netanyahu’s camp finished on 53 and the opposition bloc on 48, and both fell well short of the 61 a majority requires. Likud’s 27 seats make it the largest single party, and the Arab parties won a record 19 between them. Herzog’s consultations gave Eisenkot 67 endorsements against 46 for Netanyahu, and that is the number that decided the tasking. Netanyahu called on Saturday for a national unity government, a request from the leader who did not receive the mandate.

The tasking is a decision with a formality still ahead of it. Herzog’s office announced it on Saturday evening and set the ceremony for Sunday, so what has happened is an instruction to try, not a government. Polymarket put Eisenkot at 71.2 percent to be the next prime minister on $180,619 of twenty-four-hour volume and 99.6 percent to receive the first mandate on $125,735, against 17.8 percent for Netanyahu. The venue expects the mandate and treats the coalition that follows it as the open question, which is the correct reading of 48 seats and a 61-seat threshold.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on November 8, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (the November 6 close for the equities and the VIX, and the service’s last prints for gold, crude and the dollar), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (November 6), FiscalData (November 5) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. Federal Register counts and document descriptions were read from the register’s own API, and the courts section draws on CourtListener’s RECAP search and the watched dockets’ own pages. The account of the Israeli tasking draws on Euronews.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman